I watched the movie a couple of months ago and ordered the book right away on amazon. I was around 12 years old when the bombay blasts took place and as a kid I did not pay any attention towards this issue . Growing up, I came to know about the Babri masjid demolition and Dawood's hand in the entire operation of these blasts. However, as any normal citizen my knowledge on this issue and about Bombay underworld was very very limited. Media focusses on the issues that they think public would be interested in and that's what we finally come to listen and care about. But, in the grand scheme of things, the news that usually makes headlines in newspapers can be actually very irrelevant.
The author has spent around 4 years in his research for completing this book and I am not surprised. It was very hard to keep track of all the names & places in the book. Half way through, I gave up on this effort and tried to follow only the important players. More than 600 people were questioned during the interrogations and nearly 175 people were directly involved in the planning of the blasts. While reading the book, I felt a deep respect and admiration towards the Bombay police and the CBI and and at times the book also made me feel ashamed of some of the people we have in these departments. From the time since these blast occurred and 1998, nearly 76000 people were booked under TADA. Anybody and everybody who was even remotely connected to this operation, that means you could a friend of friend of somebody who knew somebody who was connected to the operation, landed in the jail.
The movie, in my opinion, spent a lot of footage on Badshah Khan and his experiences after the blast and this in the book was confined to very few pages. The entire episode of Sanjay dutt did not make it into the film and rightly so. It is funny how the media focussed their attention on such a silly issue when there were so many important events going on at that time. The chapter dedicated to bollywood made me sympathetic towards Sanjay and his family.
The author interviewed several people from CBI, Bombay police, Bollywood and several other people directly or indirectly connected to this operation and in most cases, he reconfirmed what he found with another source. The few pages dedicated to Dawood to me was the most interesting. I googled Dawood several times before and I never came up with any more information that what I already knew. This book, though it is very few pages, provided some interesting info on him, his hobbies and his fall out with Chota rajan.
Ram gopal varma, on his blog, mentioned about a man called Hanif Kadawala who he met at a producer's house in 1999. Hanif who had links with underworld apparently told RGV about how Chota rajan still respects Dawood even though both of them want to kill each other. This gave RGV the idea for his movie, Company. As I was very interested in knowing about underworld, I googled Hanif kadawala but could not find much information. While reading the book, when I came across this guy's name, it gave me goose bumps. However he was a small fish in the operation and he did not have any role with the actual bomb blast. But still he had to pay for his involvement with Dawood with his life. In 2001, when Chota rajan came out of Dawood's gang both the parties killed several people in each other's territory though they had very little to do with anything.
If you are even remotely interested to find some facts about the 1993 blasts don't miss this book.
